Whether your background is in statistics and data crunching or whether you come from the usability / design world, if you are a web analyst your main goal is to help influence a positive experience for the customer.  Regardless of if your site is an ecommerce site, a non-profit site, a lead generation site, or just a blog site, if your customer has a good experience there is a much better chance that your customer will do whatever it is you wanted them to do than if their experience is bad.

Sometimes, this goal can seem a little intangible.  You might not feel like you can really have an impact on your site just because you report on the numbers and give insights into why the site conversion might be lower than normal. 

 But if you find something key, for instance maybe email visitor conversion is down -15%, the email team can review their content and marketing strategy and determine that they need to make changes.  Or maybe you determine that your main landing page has a 30% departure rate, but 90% of that departure was from a specific ad campaign which was mistargeted (so the ad team won’t use that campaign again!).  Your insights got the ball rolling on creating a better system. 

Most of the web analysts I’ve met are definitely a special breed (and I mean this in a good way).  Some come from an advertising background, many come from a search back ground, and more still come from some sort of technical background.  But more often than not, it seems that we web analysts are not in the position to design a new landing page, or create a new email marketing strategy.  Rather, we can only add influence to these teams.  But when we see new design templates and we see a change in strategy and we monitor the results which turn into positive we can feel good that we had a hand in providing actionable insights to our internal customers and in turn they provide a better experience for our external customers.